Party Parent is a concept developed with a small team of UX Designers for a startup in Atlanta, GA. We connected with our client to help define the planning experience, visual design, and flow of the website.
With a team of UX Designers, I helped a startup understand the needs of a user group and visualize a digital product and service. Project brief in hand, and with periodic meetings with our client, we employed a user-centric design process that covered research to prototype.
Combining our client's expertise with our competitive and comparative research enabled us to pour lots of time into getting to know our users. We reached out to a few groups to find a variety of types of people that fell into the target user group - people who plan parties for their kids.
During the interview process, we made sure to have a team of two at every conversation. One person took the lead in the talking, while the other took notes. This helped keep the interviews natural feeling, so we could get our users to start talking about their experiences without interruptions.
We got lots of good insights and data from interviews and an online survey. We sorted through our notes, and pulled out relevant pieces of information. We then came together to group and understand what our users were saying.
This enabled us to build off the team's collective knowledge, so we could gather common pain points and start to build intelligent solutions to the problems we found.
Working as a team to assemble an affinity map boosted our distillation of the data. We were able to put our heads together, and build off insights we had in various interviews.
Based on our interviews and reflection on the information we gathered so far, the team put together two personas to help guide the design divisions. Kelly, an older mom who likes things managed for her, and Sarah, a newer mom who is a self-described Pinterest queen and wants to create a unique party.
We used these personas as references throughout our designing and user testing to help remember key attributes found in Party Parent users.
After we finished the initial research phase, we had a meeting with our client to present our findings, and share our strategy for solving the problem.
This helped ensure we were on the same page as our client, as well as set clear expectations for deliverables.
Working with the client, we wrote out a problem statement that would guide our movement throughout the rest of the project.
We used a combination of interviews, surveys, whiteboarding sessions, affinity mapping, and lots of information sharing via Google Drive to keep track of our research. Everything being visual and collaborative gave the team a unified vision to execute the design phase efficiently.
Our team broke the iterative design stages into three phases. This helped us keep on top of user testing as we maintained our schedule to deliver the product on time.
We started off bouncing between whiteboard, sketchbook, and lo-fi digital prototyping to get user feedback as we developed the UI. As the design process developed, we continued to refine the fidelity of our prototypes used for testing.
Keeping things loose in the beginning enabled us to quickly get past bad ideas, and start refining the good ones as quickly as possible.
At every opportunity, the team was happy to let people test run our new product. This enabled us to catch problems as they occurred, and make changes accordingly.
We knew the general direction the site needed to take, but wanted to get some feedback on general functionality before getting too deep into the design. We first concentrated on general layout elements and navigation.
After getting an idea of layout and navigation, we were able to use our findings to uphold some AB testing. We allowed users to interact with various methods of achieving the same task, and looked for pain-points or inefficiencies to optimize.
With a good amount of user testing data in hand, the team pushed into copywriting and brand identity. Party Parent deserved a refined site with intuitive language and a happy personality. We also kept accessibility issues in mind as we probed various font and color schemes.
The site map breaks Party Parent down to its simplest form. We used this to communicate how the site would function.
The team developed a series of user flows to highlight the paths a user would take to accomplish a variety of common scenarios. Mapping everything out not only continued to reveal areas to be optimized, but also gave us the visual tools to communicate a complex idea to our client.
We started off with a logo provided by our client as inspiration. We elaborated on the design to develop the new Party Parent logo. After a bunch of whiteboarding and aesthetic development, we landed on a rounded P with a ballon in it. The final logo got a tilted balloon to be playful, while the colors and shape were carefully considered for scalability and readability for anyone with vision impairment.
We selected the color scheme and typeface carefully to maintain a happy and playful feel, while also being versatile enough to span across many types of family parties and events.
As part of the project deliverable, we included a detailed style guide including Typeface, color schemes, and an interaction guide. The client could then use the guide to communicate precisely with developers to visualize exactly what makes the Party Parent prototype shine.
Party Parent attends to planning needs in a fun and creative way. The homepage gives people an overview of what Party Parent does, and how it can help. There are prominent options to explore the services connected with the site, as well as to start planning a party right away.
Party Parent combines a collection of services, venues, and themes into an interactive planning tool. The tool is broken down into two facets - one to keep track of the daily to-do list, and the other to visually itemize all the elements that make for a great party.
Many party planners use a central theme to help direct their purchasing decisions, and to guide every detail to come together into a cohesive whole. Selecting a theme will automatically call up matching items.
Venues and services for parties are organized into a searchable database. Users can rate and view others' comments about their experiences. Party Parent will connect planners directly with the vendors.
Party parent uses a fun onboarding experience to organize upcoming events, and start planning with plenty of time. Users can edit and adjust the information saved here at any time.
The user profile not only keeps personal information, but it also stores information about previous parties. Lots of the users interviewed love looking through their notes for inspiration and guidance, and Party Parent keeps that great informtion safe.
Check out the video walkthrough for Party Parent to see what the team came up with.
Thanks for looking!